Fire destroyed books, but sparked appreciation
Drawing to the end of the school year, a tragedy at York Memorial Collegiate underlined the importance of books for students
What student, staring down a looming final exam, or dreading an essay deadline, has not secretly wished for their school to burn down? And — let’s be frank — what teacher, struggling with an, ahem, “challenging” class, or a stack of seemingly endless marking, has not entertained the same thought? But the reality of a school fire is something very different than the fantasy might suggest. On Monday May 6, York Memorial Collegiate, the school where I have taught English and Social Science for 12 years, caught fire and burned for two days. Teachers and students exited the school thinking they were leaving for a routine fire drill and that re-entry would be imminent. Instead, what seemed like a manageable fire — as these things go — morphed into a six-alarm blaze over
night and decimated much of the structure of the building. At one point, the fire was so vehement, firefighters were forbidden from entering the building, forced instead to pump gallons of water from overhead cranes. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Still, a place of learning has lost much of its roof and walls and many of its precious resources, including its many books.
Anything in the school that was not burned or smoke-damaged has likely been drowned. Kids lost backpacks, textbooks, notes, phones, laptops. For the three days during which teachers and administrators scrambled to facilitate a return to routine and normalcy, approximately 900 students were left with no home away from home. When we shared our experiences of the event and its aftermath that first day back in our host school, George Harvey Collegiate, my students reported feeling lost during their “time off,” as if time had slowed. They told me about the jealous, gossipy texts they received from friends who envied them their unexpected holiday. But it didn’t feel like a holiday, they said.
Teachers too, mourned. Many lost years of materials — magical binders full of unit and lesson plans, photocopies of resources and long-held texts. My colleague is still grieving the loss of her copy of Macbeth, whose pages were scrawled with notes to herself — strategies and reminders gathered over 20 years in the classroom. It is natural that, as an English teacher, my biggest sadness is rooted in the loss of our large collection of books.
But, really, what do a few books matter now that most of what we read can be found in the cloud, only a couple of clicks away? And shouldn’t we be heading in this direction anyway — integrating more technology into the classroom, preparing our young people to become efficient digital citizens? It is certainly true that I have taken personal solace in the fact that many of my teaching and reference materials have migrated online in the past half dozen years.
However, this fire has in fact shown me quite immediately and starkly that books matter deeply in the classroom.
My Philosophy students — a class of 24, now sharing four textbooks — report they are better able to absorb content when they glean information from a textbook rather than constantly “searching it up” through a screen. My English students tell me they like reading books because they can see how far they’ve progressed, and that there is something special about knowing they are not the first to lay hands on a school text. A physical book has a tactile physical memory, a palpable human imprint — institutional stamps, previous students’ names and home forms, dogeared pages, question marks and dirty doodles.
And multiple studies have shown that simply having books in a young person’s physical environment encourages literacy. As an English department, we have spent years curating classroom libraries that reflect our students’ temperaments, backgrounds, interests and wildly divergent reading levels; and revamping our “canons” to include not only Indigenous and multicultural voices traditionally missing from the mix but also genre fiction and graphic novels more likely to engage reluctant readers. Libraries and classrooms create spaces for people to meet and greet books — and room to enter the mental quiet required to read for extended periods of time.
Books also represent a refuge from the world of electronics; a means of healing our fractured attention spans. A book is a shared private space — within its covers, a reader meets the text in all manner of ways without the distraction of multiple pings, alerts and social media tangents.
Students — at least those who have trained themselves to resist the lure of the screen — yearn for that type of escape, respite and deep thinking. And those who don’t crave a good book are usually surprised how hooked they become once they find the right comic, novel or poetry collection.
The students of York Memorial are settling into their new temporary home at George Harvey Collegiate, using books borrowed or generously donated by the books community. There is obvious consolation, and genuine excitement, in unboxing these treasures. Although it will take a long time to replace what the school has lost, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest that the return of books is playing a role in helping our school community carry on.
Here’s the truth: actual, physical, keepturnin’-them-pages books are vital to learning — and, I would argue, to human well-being.
And if this fire has taught me anything, it’s that we must never take books (and the places that house them) for granted. Indeed, we must protect and champion them every chance we get. Heather Birrell has taught English and social science at York Memorial Collegiate for the past 12 years. She is also a writer whose latest book, a collection of poems titled Float and Scurry, is forthcoming out this fall.